EFF

It seems that the seemingly innocuous Android 4.4.2 update is putting Google
under a bit of heat. The Electronic Frontier Foundation or EFF, one of the more popular digital rights advocacy groups in the US, is taking Google to task for removing the possibility of accessing the App Ops feature.

Did you know that your right to root your Android phone is actually protected by U.S. copyright law? It's true. In a 2010 revision to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the US Copyright Office granted an exemption that made modifying copyrighted software legal for the purposes of unlocking phones. This was mostly aimed at the iPhone (as Apple was trying to establish a legal precedent for suing its own customers at the time) but the exemption applies to any cell phone, including all Android phones sold in the United States. There's just one problem: the exemption wasn't permanent, and it's set to expire later this year.